


Prospero's Rooms

by DoctorScarlet (CadetDru)



Series: Cellar Door [1]
Category: The Masque of the Red Death - Edgar Allan Poe
Genre: Death, Fatalism, Gallows Humor, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Original Character Death(s), Plague, Prospero's Party
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2020-04-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 16:39:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23446180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CadetDru/pseuds/DoctorScarlet
Series: Cellar Door [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1686952
Kudos: 3





	1. Blue Room: Buffoons

He was a clown. He was wearing wild and random patterns of gold and yellow. He was there to jump and laugh and cavort, to stand out against the blue apartment that Prospero had appointed. He made merry and was joyful because there was no other option. 

He was supposed to lift the spirits of the guests, or he would be turned out into the world. His face would be marked with red, bleeding from his face mere moments before his death. 

Prospero would keep him safe and warm, so long as he laughed and danced and made others do the same. 


	2. Purple Room: Poets

The guests weren't listening to the poetry being recited, but it didn't matter. She'd left her family outside Prospero’s stronghold of celebration. Her family was going to die of the plague, and she was shielded from them. The least she could do was remember the proper rhyme. 

They had given her a color scheme, a general idea of what to wear. She was wearing a lovely velvet dress. She had pockets full of chapbooks and hand-copied poems to read. She had no room for guilt. 


	3. Green Room: Ballet Dancers

The dancers jumped as best that they could, it being the main kind of dancing available to them. They wore gold slippers that slammed down on the green floor. They wore gold tights and gold garments that gleamed in what light that there was. They tried not to hit the guests, which was the primary goal. Entertaining them was secondary. 

(Surviving came before all of that. If they pleased Prospero and his guests, if they found the energy to go on, then they could stay. Prospero ultimately decided if they were to live or die.)


	4. Blue Room: Buffoons

Musicians were beggars, and couldn’t be choosers. Death was ravaging them all. Prospero didn’t care. Prospero wanted music along with glitter and glamor. The gig was good because the money was good. The gig itself was actually kind of terrible. Prospero wanted to laugh in the face of Death.

She was a musician. She needed the money. She needed the safety, given by the illusion of security. 

Black was the traditional color. The musician owned black dresses and black capes and black of everything. Black wasn’t allowed. They wore gold so as not to match any room in particular. She didn’t own a gold orchestra dress, who would? A friend of hers was making masks--- futilely-- out of cloth. They had access to gold curtains. The musician provided her measurements, and a demure but boldly colored dress was created.

She played in the miniature orchestra. The clock booming out the hour stopped them dead each time. Each performer wore impeccable makeup, which could easily mask the signs of the disease. 

She would play to the end. She would die in this opulent, decadent home. The partygoers, if they should outlive her, would hardly notice her passing, except for a beat missed in the songs. 


	5. White Room: Beauty

They stood on white pedestals, draped in gold. Living statues, there just to be gawked at. The other performers at least had something to do. Lounging was a nice idea in theory, but the practical application meant keeping one's mind completely blank of all issues, all troubles of any kind. 

He didn't know how long he could take it. He wasn't thinking of anything at all. Not of who he had left behind, of who he sassy before him that he worried might have been already exposed. He was a three-dimensional portrait, a statue, a representation of what a relaxed, attractive man might look like in surprisingly harsh light.


	6. Violet Room: Wine

Sommeliers dressed in gold, pouring red and white wine. Not a drop spilled, even if their hands were shaking. The guests were drinking heavily. The wine stewards snuck a glass or three to themselves and to the others, to the entertainers who needed liquid courage. A drop or two here couldn’t hurt anyone.

Prospero would kill them if he knew. Directly or indirectly by being thrown out a window to the plague. It was an act or mercy, not if rebellion. Death would come one way or another, no one deserved to have to face it sober. 


	7. Black Room: Security

Security was there to keep anyone from coming in or getting out. They couldn't wear black, so it was brown and grey. They stayed in the last room, in the black room, where they would be undisturbed by the beautiful people, the guests and the deliberately visible servants. They wandered around, but the last room was their home base. No one was to go out and no one was to come in.

Death didn't play by their rules.

Death was among them. The same oddly burning chill that came over them at the end of the hour came upon them as one partygoer stalked through. Death had come, invited by some or all. Outsiders, brought in as entertainment, had brought the plague with them. No quarantine was strong enough if it was so easily ignored. 

Prospero, along with his guests and his underlings, succumbed to the plague soon enough. 


End file.
